Maybe I'm in the minority, but I still think if a company came out with a cellphone that had at least as good audio as you get with Skype or Magic-Jack, sales would be brisk. Only problem is, both parties would have to have the same cellphone or the audio would be no better.
It's absolutely amazing to me that with today's technology, phones don't routinely have 20 Hz to 10 KHz audio response. If they can send video over a cellphone, why not high-fidelity audio? Audio takes a lot less bandwidth than video. I guess we need more engineers making technical decisions.

Unfortunately for digital telephony, the digital voice standards use the old analog 4 KHz limit (3KHz audio in practice) as the gold standard, and attempt to approach that with perceptual coding techniques. So audio quality will never be good.
But there is a way around that: Skype. Audio over Skype easily beats the quality of compressed ~9.6 Kb/s cellular audio.
As to the picture quality, actually I like that improvement. Was once a silver halide photo buff of sorts. Now that you can't even find decent film anymore, I've gotten to rely on my cell phone as a handy camera, always available. But it could stand a lot of improvement in terms of resolution.

I'm an audio kind of guy and I totally agree with Bob. But unfortunately good, quality, duplex audio (and therefore pleasant phone conversations) went out as soon as phones started to get sold on gadgetry instead of audio quality, which conincided with the emergence of digital over analog. Also, as the number of users grew exponentially spoken words necessarily became multiplexed packets of data instead of continuous transmissions of expression. Since that is never coming back, I think guys like us will be left wanting.

It's interesting that neither Microsoft with its Wi8ndows franchise or Blackberry with its "crackberry" momentum could keep pace with Apple and Android so far.
Blackberry 10 is a solid effort, but I don't see it helping them catch up. Rather I think it will let them sustain their position a while longer.

Why is it every time a new cellphone is launched, they tell us consumers how great the camera is. Who cares?
I have never, nor will I ever, use my phone for a camera. I have an HD camera that runs rings around any phone camera for taking pictures.
My wife didn't heed my advice and lost some very important pictures of her now-deceased parents when the phone went dead. It was not recoverable.
Why don't they tell us how great the audio quality of the new phone is? That's what really matters.
Every new phone introduced seems to have worst audio quality than the previous generation. And Blackberry's audio quality, in my opinion, is one of the worse, although the others are quickly catching up. Don't know why that is, but that is my experience with Smart Phones.

Comparisons to iPAD are really misleading...iPAD for Apple was a new device in a cool form factor that people liked...new BlackBerry is just another phone, I don't see how that can change the sales significantly...they will not disappear but they will nt crush Apple either

BB could offer the most secure system end-to-end in the past. Today, this is no longer true. Even if BB still own the title, given BOYD and given that it pretty much lost the war among consumers, whatever it had in the enterprise market will simply have a slow death. Those in the rank and file at BB should start to think about the exit plan. Any investors who keep singing cheerfully are simply trying to offload their investment to those with less intelligence. BB will remain a small niche company and become extinct if it is not careful. For those who argue BB still have the chance, please consider what Microsoft can offer in the enterprise.

In the age of smart device, I don't think any makers would have much choice in terms of form factor. Probably, not until a retractable screen or a projection screen out of thin air are used, all devices are going to look very similar to each other - a rectangular box with a glass.
Soon after iPad coming out to the market, there have been a movement of security in mobile device. I haven't seen a major product until Blackberry's announcement. The questions are how secure and why corporation would rather have it. Now, it's a test to Blackberry marketing. Stay Tune!

Why do articles relating to BlackBerry always talk about how secure their phones are compared to others?
Who exactly needs such security? Why would a company use email to send such secure data in the first place?
Blackberry's were just cool for a while. Now they're not. End of story.